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As Chicago Strike Goes On, the Mayor Digs In

Teachers gathered to review the tentative contract in Chicago.Credit
Nathan Weber for The New York Times

CHICAGO — As the president of the Chicago Teachers Union emerged from a meeting of her union delegates on Sunday night to announce that, no, school would not be starting up again and that, no, the delegates were not ready to sign off on what had seemed like a deal, Mayor Rahm Emanuel watched her on a television in City Hall.

If the rest of the city was stunned to learn that the teachers’ strike was not over, Mr. Emanuel appeared disappointed but relatively calm, those with him said, having already gamed out just such a possibility with his aides. Not long after, he issued a statement that, in trademark tough-guy form, offered not even a passing whiff of conciliation: he accused the union of using children as pawns, and said he was going to court — an option he had checked on weeks ago, just in case, and one he carried out first thing Monday morning.

While hundreds of thousands of Chicago children have begun a second week with no classes, Mr. Emanuel has placed himself firmly in the center of the standoff. He has been the loudest, pushiest voice for longer school days and tougher teacher evaluations, and he now finds himself as the target of fury in the picket lines around the city, where some teachers wear buttons showing a line drawn through Mr. Emanuel’s face and others carry signs that demand, “What’s Rahm With You?”

The risks, politically, are enormous. Much depends on what happens Tuesday, when the union’s delegates meet to again consider a deal their negotiators, including Karen Lewis, the union president, reached with negotiators from the Chicago Public Schools. But few have as much stake in what comes next — a quick reopening of schools by Wednesday or a far longer, grimmer battle — as Mr. Emanuel.

“This is the first issue that’s gone out of control for Rahm,” said Don Rose, a longtime political strategist in Chicago. “And it’s the first issue where he’s really coming up on the wrong side of the polls. He made this personal, and now it’s his.”

As promised, Mr. Emanuel’s administration on Monday sought a preliminary injunction to end the strike, maintaining that state law “expressly prohibits” teachers from striking over noneconomic issues, including layoffs and teacher evaluations. A judge was expected to hear the case on Wednesday morning if schools had not reopened.

But to union leaders, the legal filing was only the latest example of Mr. Emanuel’s “bullying behavior,” said a union spokeswoman, Stephanie Gadlin, who described the injunction as a “vindictive act instigated by the mayor.”

Gary N. Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University, described Mr. Emanuel’s decision to take the matter to court now as “a declaration of war,” adding, “I don’t think the mayor understands that the goal of negotiating is to get an agreement, not to win.”

If teachers continue the strike beyond Tuesday, they risk losing support from students’ families, many of whom expressed patience in the first week of the strike but were sounding increasingly exasperated heading into Week 2. Fading union support would potentially benefit Mr. Emanuel, political observers here said, but all agreed that no one would win politically if the strike dragged on.

Mr. Emanuel has his enthusiastic backers in his push for more days and hours in school and for teacher evaluations that consider student test scores, but unions beyond those that represent teachers are irked at Mr. Emanuel’s aggressive handling of the situation. The anger is personal, not aimed generically at some school board or City Hall but squarely at him. When he took his daughter to a Bruce Springsteen concert at Wrigley Field this month, a man approached them and started to speak to the girl. “Your father is,” he began, finishing the sentence with an expletive.

In an interview, Mr. Emanuel was unapologetic for his tactics, unwilling to name anything particular he wished he had done differently, and defiant toward his critics. His whole point, he said, again and again, was to “get the kids of Chicago to the starting line with other kids.”

Photo

Karen Lewis, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, after the meeting on Sunday.Credit
Nathan Weber for The New York Times

“I did not come to the office of mayor at this point in my career so I get the glory of running for re-election,” he said. “I came here to use this office to bring change. And I want to make sure that the kids of the city of Chicago get the opportunity to have reading and writing, not choose between them.”

It remained anyone’s call whether the deal struck by negotiators will be accepted on Tuesday by union delegates — 800 of them, from schools around the city — who chose not to do so on Sunday night. In interviews, delegates’ views on the proposal seemed to range widely, and gave few hints whether Ms. Lewis, the president, had gathered a consensus behind the deal, which she had earlier deemed good if imperfect.

Some said they wanted to get back to school right away, while others said they needed more time to study provisions of the contract. Some said they simply did not like what they saw on issues like pay, evaluations and a wellness program.

“It wasn’t ready,” said James Dongas, a delegate at Lane Tech College Prep high school, who described the tentative deal as premature. “It wasn’t cooked.”

Mr. Emanuel, a political operative in two White Houses and former Democratic member of the House, has dismissed suggestions that he has been racing to get a settlement to erase a political complication amid the presidential campaign. President Obama has not publicly taken a side in the strike, which awkwardly pits his former chief of staff against labor, both key allies. A sign in one union demonstration proclaimed, “Voted for Obama Ended Up With Rahmney,” an allusion to critics’ sense that Mr. Emanuel’s position is now aligned more closely with that of Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, and his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who had announced his support for Mr. Emanuel in the strike.

Mr. Emanuel confirmed that he spoke to Mr. Obama last week after the strike began, as he often does, and to David Axelrod, a longtime close friend and senior Obama campaign adviser, but Mr. Emanuel said, “I have not received any pressure, and no pressure would work.”

The president has periodic contact with Mr. Emanuel, usually to talk policy, an Obama aide said, confirming that the two spoke once last week. No calls, the aide said, were placed to apply pressure in either direction.

Even before Mr. Emanuel took office in 2011, he had ticked off ways he would change the schools: more hours, more days, better outcomes. But if the philosophy was already counter to what some teachers — fearing public school closings and the arrival of charter schools — had hoped to hear, Mr. Emanuel did it with flourish.

He once said that Chicago’s children were getting “the shaft.” He pressed for legislation that would, among other things, require the union to have a higher percentage of support from members to allow a strike. He backed a plan that rescinded a promised raise to teachers. And along the picket lines here, teachers list the affronts, one by one.

Among parents and others, though, there are other views.

“People can ask: ‘Did the mayor push too hard? Was he too aggressive?’ ” said Timothy Knowles of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago, who served on Mr. Emanuel’s transition team. “But when all the dust settles, I think other mayors will look and say: Rahm got an extra hour. He took some hits, but he got big changes.”

Those around Mr. Emanuel say he has been deeply upset over the strike and has kept tabs on contract talks that went on for days with a nearly constant run of e-mails and calls to a top aide who took part in them.

Still, he has also seemed serene about the city’s position. Mr. Emanuel said his wife, Amy, told him one morning as he left for work last week that having seen him through numerous ordeals, she had never seen him look calmer.

“This system needed a major push toward reform,” he said. “It couldn’t be done incrementally.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 18, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: As Chicago Strike Goes On, the Mayor Digs In. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe